Facing stinging criticism about the quality of its search results, Google late Thursday made a significant change to its search engine to try to combat the growing number of websites that exist primarily to land high on its rankings.
These "content farms" and other websites that produce low-quality content were damaging the usefulness of Google's search results, many outside experts charged.
What Google called "a major improvement" was designed to highlight sites with high-quality content and will noticeably affect about 12 percent of all U.S. searches.
It is also a clear signal that the company was concerned about the problem. Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who is in charge of Google's search algorithm, said Google recognized the problem more than 15 months ago, and was working on a solution long before this wave of criticism.
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It's too soon to know whether the change will be enough to silence critics, some of whom have said Google has not fought hard enough against these sites because it shares in the advertising revenue they generate. "That perception … could not be further from the truth," Matt Cutts, Google principal engineer, fired back at critics.
Critics include Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley; Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch blog; and University of London researchers.
Google is dominant in search in North America and much of Europe, with the criticism appearing not to have a significant impact on its market share.
On Feb. 7, University of London researchers published a paper saying Google's efforts to personalize search results may actually do more to help advertisers target users than help searchers find what they want.
And Wadhwa posted an influential blog Jan. 1. He and other critics accused Google of not doing enough to stop content farms from manipulating its search results. When some people invariably click on those results, they go to pages that often include Google text or display ads, Web traffic with the potential to earn revenue for the website - and for Google. In that scenario, Google is not just allowing poor content, it is directly profiting from it.
A large share of Google's profit "is coming from this spam," said Wadhwa. Reached Thursday, he said Google's announced change showed the company is serious about fixing the problem, and is doing many of the right things.
BLOCKING SPAM AND 'CONTENT FARMS':
• On the Web: The search engine Blekko.com allows users to click on any result to designate it as "spam," blocking future results from that site. And on Thursday, Google revised its search engine to try to combat such sites.
• In your browser: A Google Chrome software tool at https://chrome.google.com/extensions allows users to block specific sites.
• The blocked: Blekko announced it would block results from the top 20 websites designated as spam by its users, including ehow.com, experts-exchange.com and naymz.com